Pervasive Business Intelligence Platform to Improve the Quality of Decision Process in Primary and Secondary Education – A Portuguese Case Study - New Contributions in Information Systems and Technologies - page 155

Pervasive Business Intelligence Platform to Improve the
Quality of Decision Process in Primary and Secondary
Education - A Portuguese Case Study
Andreia Ferreira, Filipe Portela, and Manuel Filipe Santos
Algoritmi Research Centre, University of Minho, Portugal
[e-mail], {cfp,mfs}@dsi.uminho.pt
Abstract. Business Intelligence (BI) can be seen as a method that gathers
information and data from information systems in order to help companies to be
more accurate in their decision-making process. Traditionally BI systems were
associated with the use of Data Warehouses (DW). The prime purpose of DW is
to serve as a repository that stores all the relevant information required for
making the correct decision. The necessity to integrate streaming data became
crucial with the need to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the decision
process. In primary and secondary education, there is a lack of BI solutions.
Due to the schools reality the main purpose of this study is to provide a
Pervasive BI solution able to monitoring the schools and student data anywhere
and anytime in real-time as well as disseminating the information through
ubiquitous devices. The first task consisted in gathering data regarding the
different choices made by the student since his enrolment in a certain school
year until the end of it. Thereafter a dimensional model was developed in order
to be possible building a BI platform. This paper presents the dimensional
model, a set of pre-defined indicators, the Pervasive Business Intelligence
characteristics and the prototype designed. The main contribution of this study
was to offer to the schools a tool that could help them to make accurate
decisions in real-time. Data dissemination was achieved through a localized
application that can be accessed anywhere and anytime.
Keywords: Business Intelligence, Innovation, Information System Architecture,
Education, Pervasiveness.
1 Introduction
Business Intelligence (BI) can be understood as a method aiming to help the
companies to take intelligent decisions, by means of data and information collected
from diverse information systems. BI systems use the data available in organizations
to provide relevant information for decision process. BI systems are traditionally
associate to the use of Date Warehouses (DW). They are considered as being a
warehouse of data, more concretely an integrated repository that allows the storage of
excellent information for the decision-making. With the need to optimize the
decision-making process, it is necessary to integrate real-time data. In order to support